The action by Archbishop Jose Gomez, relieving Cardinal Roger Mahony
of “any administrative or public duties,” was remarkable on two levels.First, it broke with the unspoken but nearly ironclad rule of the
culture of Catholic hierarchy that bishops do not publicly criticize
other bishops. That courtesy extended even to the most egregious
examples of ecclesial malfeasance – the deliberate and persistent hiding
of criminal activities by priests. No one to this point had uttered a
word against a predecessor, not in New York or Connecticut, not in
Philadelphia or Milwaukee, not in Seattle or Santa Fe. There were
“mistakes made,” they would say, and offer vacuous apologies. For
whatever reasons yet unknown, Gomez broke the code.Second, the language Gomez used was blunt and unqualified. The
behavior he found in the files, he said, was “evil.” The acts themselves
and the handling of these matters, as the files revealed, showed more
than mistakes made, they showed a “terrible failure.”

“I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior
described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse,
no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved
had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed,” Gomez
wrote, who also referred to Mahony’s sorrow “for his failure to fully
protect young people entrusted to his care.”

Gomez’s words are a direct contradiction of the weak defense that
Mahony has advanced for years, all the while spending untold sums in
attempts to keep the truth hidden. It is the same list of explanations
that he repeated in a lengthy and testy response to Gomez’s statement.

“Nothing in my own background or education equipped me to deal with this
grave problem,” wrote Mahony. In studying for his master’s degree in
social work, he said, no lecture or textbook ever referred to the sexual
abuse of children.There is, of course, some truth to the “we didn’t know” defense. Few
knew, years ago, the seriousness of the disease borne by those who
molest children. Much of it remains a mystery today.But the “we didn’t know” defense quickly wears thin against the
details contained in the 12,000 pages of documents that were just
released by the court in Los Angeles, just as it wore thin against the
truth revealed when documents were released in other places like
Philadelphia and Boston.

That’s why Mahony spent so much time and money over nearly a decade
attempting to keep the documents sealed. It’s why, even after agreeing
to release documents as part of a 2007 settlement with 508 victims
costing $660 million, he continued to fight tooth and nail to keep the
documents secret.

It is why he and the diocese’s lawyers tried a last
ditch and ultimately failed attempt to get the courts to redact the
names of church officials from the documents so that it would be
difficult to tell who did what. The documents put the lie to the “we
didn’t know” defense.What they demonstrate – and we have yet to read through all the
thousands of pages -- is that diocesan officials, while they may not
have understood the intricacies of the sex abuser’s mind and motivation,
did know that laws were being broken, children were being raped and
otherwise abused.

They knew they had to take extraordinary lengths --
sending priests to counselors who were also lawyers so they could claim
their conversations were privileged, sending some priests out of the
country and others from parish to parish and diocese to diocese -- to
avoid detection by the law and by the very Catholic community the
officials were charged to serve.

They knew enough to understand they had
to hide the crimes and the behavior if they didn’t want to besmirch the
good name of the clergy culture. Consideration of what was happening to
the abused children and their families was incidental, at best.What Mahony and others -- Cardinals Bernard Law, Justin Rigali,
Edward Egan, Anthony Bevilacqua, and a host of archbishops and bishops
-- really didn’t understand was the degree to which their moral
compasses had been distorted by the strong magnetic pull of the clergy
culture.

In their fierce allegiance to that exclusive club at all costs,
in their willingness to preserve the façade of holiness and the
faithful’s high notion of ordination, they lost sight of simple human
decency and the most fundamental demands of the gospel.It doesn’t take a master’s or a doctorate to understand that the
first obligation of adults is to protect the children. When the first
instinct became protection of the clergy and the institution, our
leaders became disfigured at some deep and essential level. The Catholic
community is still waiting for them to deal honestly with that reality,
with what happens to them when their robes turn to purple.Meanwhile, there are no heroes in any of this. Gomez may have broken
with normal behaviors, but as many have already pointed out, he had
access to the documents for two years and said nothing. And it is
reasonable to expect that if Mahony and the lawyers had succeeded in
keeping the documents sealed, nothing would have been said. The “evil”
would have remained festering on some chancery shelf.

If Archbishop Gomez really wants to do a service to the people of God
in Los Angeles, he will reveal how much of the archdiocese’s treasury
was spent during the last decade on trying to hide that truth.

By its
own admission the Kansas City-St. Joseph, Mo., diocese spent $1.39 million
in a failed 18-month attempt to defend Bishop Robert Finn from charges
of failing to report a child pornographer, and the Milwaukee archdiocese
has spent $9 million
in a two-year-long, far-from-settled bankruptcy case precipitated by
sex abuse law suits.

The amount of money the Los Angeles archdiocese has
spent hiding these documents must be mind-boggling. That is evil, as
well.There are no heroes among the many other chancery officials and
public relations advisors and lawyers who knew, some for many years,
what crimes and sins had been committed against children.There are no heroes in the Vatican structures, on up to the pope,
among those who years ago could have demanded a review of the documents,
come to the same conclusions as Gomez and removed Mahony long ago.

It
would have saved the church of Los Angeles years of suspense and
enormous amounts of money. We say we believe that the truth will set us
free. In too many dioceses today, the truth remains hidden and the
church remains in chains fashioned by its bishops.Endless speculation will swirl now about why Gomez did what he did
and what precisely it means. None of that really matters. What matters
is the truth that will outlast reporters, commentators, perpetrators,
cardinals, bishops, victims and the rest.

The revelation and
preservation of that truth in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles just
received a boost with the release of the documents.